Gethin Wyn Williams
Name: Gethin Wyn Williams
Position: 4th year PhD student
Supervisor: Dr Ben McMillan
Project Title: Fast Ions and Turbulence in Fusion Plasmas
Background: MPhys, Lancaster University (2019)
Project Outline
Fast particles in tokamaks are introduced by sources such as neutral beam injection, RF heating and fusion alphas. The fast particles interact and drive electromagnetic waves in the plasma, including modified ideal MHD. These driven modes will lead to a redistribution of the fast-particles and also to bulk transport of the electrons. These instabilities lead to poor confinement of the plasma in the tokamak, in turn this has a negative impact on the performance of the device.
The project is a part of a UK-wide collaboration to understand the role of plasma turbulence across a range of length scales to design more efficient tokamak reactors. The project will involve simulating and analysing the coupling of global-scale em turbulence with ion-scale instabilities for fast particles in tokamak reactors. This means running high performance computing codes such as GENE and understanding the plasma theory that describes tokamak turbulence.